Founding Network Engineer for AI Inference Data Center

General Compute; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

General Compute is building a dedicated data center network to support its heterogeneous accelerator fleet for AI/HPC workloads. You will design and deploy the entire network fabric, ensuring high bandwidth, low latency, and secure multi-tenant connectivity across sites.

As an early hire at a 6–7 person company, you will tackle diverse challenges from cable routing to vendor management, shaping the backbone that powers inference across our fleet.

Qualifications

• Hands-on design and deployment of data center networks.
• Deep routing and switching knowledge for modern DC fabrics.
• Experience building high-performance networks for AI/HPC clusters or latency-critical environments.
• Network automation skills (Python, Ansible) and treating config as code.
• Comfort on the data center floor handling cabling and hardware issues.
• Comfort with hardware heterogeneity and ambiguity.
• Genuine interest in being an early hire at a ~6–7 person company.

Responsibilities

• Design and own the data center network architecture: leaf-spine fabric, high-bandwidth, low-latency paths between GPU prefill and ASIC decode systems, and out-of-band management.
• Lead the network build-out for each new site: BOMs, rack elevations, cabling, cross-connects, and bring-up through acceptance testing.
• Translate accelerator vendor networking requirements into a single consistent fleet design.
• Set up external connectivity: IP transit, peering, and private connections to customers.
• Build tenant isolation and network security from day one.
• Automate configuration, provisioning, and validation against a single source of truth.
• Build monitoring and telemetry for the fabric, and own network incident response.
• Manage network hardware vendors, carriers, colocation providers, remote hands teams.
• Collaborate with platform team; own L2/L3 network, fabric performance, site connectivity; hand off to platform for fleet-wide routing.

Skills

DC network design

BGP/EVPN-VXLAN/ECMP

AI/HPC network experience

Network automation (Python/Ansible)

On-site cabling & hardware fault-fix

Hardware heterogeneity

Startup mindset

Tools

NetBox

Nautobot

gNMI

Job description

General Compute is building a dedicated data center network to support its heterogeneous accelerator fleet for AI/HPC workloads. You will design and deploy the entire network fabric, ensuring high bandwidth, low latency, and secure multi-tenant connectivity across sites.

As an early hire at a 6–7 person company, you will tackle diverse challenges from cable routing to vendor management, shaping the backbone that powers inference across our fleet.